Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
Earth now has 8 billion people—and counting. Where do we go from here?
We’ve added a billion people in just 12 years. The implications for the planet—and our own welfare—hinge on how we tackle climate change.
www.nationalgeographic.com
To add to Chimpzy's point; so basically a roof with solar panels.
That's quite a nice idea by the by. I wonder if the roof was sufficiently wide to also protect cyclists from rain falling on from the sides.
Any demographic for which it's under about 2.1 is going to shrink, however. See Japan for what that looks like after just a few decades.
I mean, you don't want stuff on top of your solar panels that might block light, and cars and road dirt aren't transparent so that's the only remotely feasible option. If it weren't for oversize shipping you could do the same for actual roads and it wouldn't be completely insane (still not a *good* idea but not painfully stupid). But, oversize loads are a thing and roads have to be able to deal with them.
There's a wide variety of common sense reforms that could shore that up, and even if they don't take them Japanese people aren't going to go extinct. They're just gonna hit a lower equilibrium point
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By which you mean that once their population shrinks enough, they'll start breeding more to bring that number back to around 2.1 births/woman or a bit higher. Because there isn't a "lower equilibrium point" than that for a given population group (barring some massive change in mortality among the young) - either they birth enough people to replace the dead (around 2.1 births/woman) or they don't. Number moves much above that and you have a growing population, much below and numbers decrease.
However you want to phrase it, I guess. Point is, humanity isn't going to go extinct through, like, ennui
That depends entirely on whether we're talking about the population of people that live in Japan or the population that are ethnically Japanese. Immigration only benefits one of those, and has at best no impact on the other.
Not really.
Give those immigrants a few hundred years and they will be "ethnically Japanese", at least as much so as any of the existing population of Japan today, who are the descendants of dozens and dozens of other ethnic groups over thousands of years.
What I think you really mean is that the prevailing culture of Japan may struggle to accept immigrants (particularly those who don't look east-Asian) as Japanese and thus may perceive immigration as incurring no benefit to them because the prevailing culture of Japan is still quite racist, even compared to most other developed countries. But frankly, dealing with that problem is likely to be far easier than trying to force women to have more children against their own will or interests. Racism, after all, has the huge disadvantage of not actually aligning with reality.
Once you go far enough, and assuming humanity survives, none of our descendants will look like us. The idea of preserving ethnic groups is intrinsically stupid, if early humans had cared about such things they would have killed themselves off by inbreeding.
Eventually, the global population will peak and even migration won't be a solution to population decline, but I don't think that really matters anyway. The population shrinking by a few billion isn't going to hurt anyone, and by then I would hope humans have either developed a society in which having children is rewarding,found some other way to do it or simply stopped dying.
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I don't agree with a decreasing population for Earth. I think we should have trillions of people on Earth eventually, and we should turn Earth into a high tech Ecumenopolis no matter who the people are. I don't care about a humanity that looks nothing like us, I just want humanity to remain a thing. How are we going to terraform Mars with 3 billion people plus have colonies in the solar system including a Dyson Swarm on the sun without it. As for Japan, if East Asia goes extinct but we get samples of their DNA we can always use science to clone them back. The problem we have is a mindset of less is good. Less people isn't good, it means less consumers, thinkers, innovation, and less power for humanity to solve problems like hopefully faster than light travel for example.
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Culture is a significant aspect of ethnicity. And I'm saying Japan is at 1.34 births/woman, meaning you'd need to immigrate or birth to immigrants about half as many people as ethnic Japanese babies are born each year just for the population to remain stable in the long term until that number goes up. I'm saying that if a third of the new population is not part of that culture, they are far less likely to assimilate and more likely to assert their former culture(s) upon their new home, especially if many of those immigrants come from the same places.
It's pretty bleak that 'consumers' is there at all, let alone that its the first one you listed.
I am a bit ticked off a liberals who think personal choice is great, but believe that anyone who has lots of kids AND can afford it are uncaring monsters.
Look at Elon Musk, guy has 8 kids, and is likely a bad father base on various reports. But every time his kids are mentioned people like Vaush call him a dynastic warlord. The problem isn't that he has 8 kids, it's that he is a bad father. Same thing with SCOTUS judge Amy Barrett, the problem isn't that she has lots of kids and was called by multiple democratic senators as a baby popper. The problem is her horrible policy views and legal views. But nope baby popper. Had that happened if I was a senator and I would be a D senator I would have walked out in anger, and I don't care what then Senate Majority leader Schumer would have done. He could have kicked me out of the democratic party caucus in the senate for all I care.
Ditto every time people mentioned Nigeria, and India as having too many babies. Good we need more people, and hopefully many come to the US. People are just so selfish, and self-centered on this issue. Me me me me like the baby boomers, like Gen X, like Gen Z, and like the millennials. From mighty acorns strong trees shall grow. The acorns being us, the tree being the human empire in the future.
Look at Elon Musk, guy has 8 kids, and is likely a bad father base on various reports. But every time his kids are mentioned people like Vaush call him a dynastic warlord. The problem isn't that he has 8 kids, it's that he is a bad father. Same thing with SCOTUS judge Amy Barrett, the problem isn't that she has lots of kids and was called by multiple democratic senators as a baby popper. The problem is her horrible policy views and legal views. But nope baby popper. Had that happened if I was a senator and I would be a D senator I would have walked out in anger, and I don't care what then Senate Majority leader Schumer would have done. He could have kicked me out of the democratic party caucus in the senate for all I care.
Ditto every time people mentioned Nigeria, and India as having too many babies. Good we need more people, and hopefully many come to the US. People are just so selfish, and self-centered on this issue. Me me me me like the baby boomers, like Gen X, like Gen Z, and like the millennials. From mighty acorns strong trees shall grow. The acorns being us, the tree being the human empire in the future.
My point really is that a decreasing population on earth just isn't a serious problem. It's a problem for an economic system that requires perpetual growth, but that system is dumb and I don't think it should survive. Even if you somehow believe it is desirable for perpetual growth to continue, it's not hard to imagine reaching the point where automation allows for that despite a declining population (and where people simply consume more because they have more resources).
Sure, you might say "think of all the great scientists and artists who won't be born" but think of all those who are born today and end up working in sweatshops or never getting the education they need. Our current society is shockingly bad at utilizing human intelligence, I don't see any reason why fewer people would slow the pace of human innovation, particularly since at that point machines would likely be augmenting human intelligence to an even greater degree than they do now.
For most of human history, the global population was measured in the low millions. Even a thousand years ago, it was only around one billion. It would take a very, very long time for population decline to become a threat to human survival, and again, I would like to think that by that point some kind of solution would have been found.
Robots.
Humans were never going to build a dyson swarm or terraform Mars, we're extremely bad at stuff like that because we require all these weird resources to maintain and because, unlike robots, we're not expendable. It takes a long time and a lot of work to make a human. Make a robot able to replicate itself and they can grow exponentially until they literally run out of resources.
I think it's more that we have hit the point of being able to question why more is good.
For all of human history, there was a constant need to expand. To fill the available space and produce more people to exploit more of the resources and do more of the work. Now we're running out of space and resources, and the work has become so efficient that most of us aren't economically necessary any more. More so than at any point in history, our lives have become less about needs and more about wants. We needed to expand and make more humans, but did we ever want to do that? Probably not, it was pretty miserable.
The whole culture war in the US is so stupid and other countries don't care about this bullshit, thus they have time to actually discuss, you know, important things.
Oh, look. We're back to Pheonix parroting whatever is said in the latest youtube video he watched regardless of how objectively and patently false it is...
He really shouldn't be getting all of his information from social media like that